Canvas
by chasingfireflies
Summary: Oneshot:: She's just been snuck up on by the other girl, graffitied a little, and scared half to death, and yet she finds herself apologizing. S/M implied.


_And so I disclaim. It's not mine. I just toy with it._

* * *

_Fly._

It's a touch, unfamiliar, as the brunette curls warm fingers around her forearm, turns her, moves her where she wants her. Marti's a little uncomfortable in the untried cheerleading uniform – it's too short, she's too exposed, she needs to wear it in. She's still a little jumpy, and then she tenses up, because she shouldn't be jumpy, shouldn't be nervous – she should be cool and calm and composed and comfortable. Every word that starts with 'c' and means something good. But she's not, and she's trying to hide it, and –

"Breathe in, Marti."

- She isn't succeeding. The captain gives another gentle tug on her arm with a grip that could be broken with ease, but Marti allows it anyway. Probably because she still feels exposed and she still feels nervous, and for some reason the feel of that warm palm on her skin is a tad reassuring. She almost – _almost_ – jumps at the sudden, cold prick of the marker, but she manages to stop it at only a startled blink.

"Power of positive thinking," she hears the girl say, drawing gentle black lines on lightly-tanned skin. "You'll do beautifully."

Marti's never been the most shining of personalities – nor entirely open, quickly trusting, smiling – so Savannah's straightforward, smiling, positive nature unnerves her a little. The hand leaves her arm, and even though her skin's oddly cold now and she'd standing on her own, she smiles and steps up beside the captain, because she's still nervous, but she could swear the ink's seeping through her skin and when it's been washed away from the surface it'll still be pressed on her heart.

Marti Perkins has never been blindingly optimistic – her positive goals for the future often lacked detail, marred as they were by every trial she faced herself with daily. But with Savannah beside her – the unlikely and unusual ally – smiling brightly, cool, confident, ghost of her touch lingering on Marti's skin, she can pretend. She mightn't know the cheer captain very well, but she _does_ know that the girl's got enough optimism for the both of them. For a moment, she convinces herself the remnant of the sharpie on her arm speaks the truth – she'll fly.

When the Memphis Christian team bombs out and Savannah goes after her sister - all optimism giving way to worry – Marti feels a guilty relief. She's not ready. She doesn't think she ever will be.

**/-/**

_Talk_.

It's scrawled on the back of her hand in an eloquent, black hand. She hates to admit it, but amongst the cheerleaders she's entirely out of her element. Give her a street dancer, a nerd, an outcast, a drunken musician at some half-assed bar downtown and she'll rock their world – hypothetically, of course, because her intimate experiences are kept just that – _intimate_. But stick the girl with a bunch of cheerleaders and she's stuck for words. There's no common interest whatsoever, nothing to discuss other than routines - basic things no one's interested in once they've changed out of the uniform – and it makes her antsy.

Marti's a genuine people person. These just aren't her people.

It's been more than a week, and it's still as awkward as day one because she doesn't know what she's doing and she doesn't know what to say. And Savannah's noticed it – around the others more than herself, because they've talked more than either had ever expected them to. She's opened up. A bit.

But it's not enough. She needs to be part of the team. So while she'd sat quietly at the dinner table and the rest of the team had branched out into their divisions and their topics and the noise had started around her, never stopped, and never included her, Savannah had snatched her hand up of the table, procured another sharpie from god knew where, and started drawing the familiar marks across her skin. There had been no protest from Marti, no skeptical or overly-interested looks from the others – nothing but fingers and marker on skin, a stain of ink, a shared smile.

"And say what?" she hardly whispers, but Savannah just gives her a bright smile and points at Lewis, who's drifted out of a conversation with Alice and is glancing at the two of them a little curiously, and with a cautious sigh Marti plucks up the fleeting drive to part her lips and push out a few more words. "Hey, Lewis, of curiosity, what's your favorite band?"

Before she knows it, they're debating the finer points of rock, country, and punk music, what blues actually is, and four or five of the other teammates are sneaking into their conversation. Savannah drops a light pat on her hand, still on the tabletop, traces the black lines with her fingertips for a second, and then withdraws, watching the back and forth with a small, satisfied smile. It's as though her fingers were never there.

But once again, Marti can almost feel the ink sink in with the ghost of a touch on the back of her hand.

**/-/**

_Smile_.

The marker pulling suddenly against the skin of her shoulder is a little bit of a shock, and she jumps in her seat, head jerking around to see the sharpie held stiffly in Savannah's hand, only a few centimeters from her skin, exposed at the edge of her tank top.

"Pssh, Marti, you messed up my writing," her captain tells her – and when it went from _the_ captain to _her_ captain she doesn't know. She's just been snuck up on by the other girl, graffitied a little, and scared half to death, and yet she finds herself apologizing – just a mumbled 'sorry, Savannah' that has the girl frowning just a little more. Marti turns back to her computer, continues tapping away at the keys, pauses, deletes the paragraph, starts again and growls a little while she does so.

She's been working at this paper for three days straight – having gotten halfway through and hit a wall – and before that she'd struggled with the new routine, worked until she was bone-weary and she had the whole thing down pat, and before _that_ she'd had a fight with Dan because of this and that and his insecurities about his new girlfriend, the cheer captain, and his unwelcome residence at her bedside every few mornings. She'd hardly bothered leaving her room for anything other than school or practice, and it had been made pretty clear she hadn't wanted anyone in there with her, Savannah aside. For the most part, she'd been left undisturbed – the squad understood enough that she was a bit stressed out, she needed to work unhindered.

After a pause and a repeat of the quick tapping of keys, the marker goes back to her shoulder to fix the mistake, and there's warm fingers splayed across her arm to help steady the writing. She won't know until Savannah's patted her on the other shoulder, lightly recommended she take a break and left for her next date with Dan ten minutes later – but then she'll drag herself to a mirror and see the travesty on her shoulder.

Except it's not a travesty – it's almost an artwork, and she can hardly tell that any of the lines were ever ruined. And as she looks at the message stained onto her skin – _'smile, and persevere'_ – it doesn't matter to her that her best friend – or is it plural now? – is out on a date with someone she kind-of-really-but-not doesn't want them to be out with, or that she's alone, or that she's got a paper due tomorrow that she's not really getting along with. What matters is that it's sweet, and it's another moment of scrawl for her to cherish.

So she smiles.

**/-/**

_Faith_.

It's a difficult cycle to break, this thing of theirs – where Marti disassociates and Savannah writes her back in. They argue about religion. It's odd, because they shouldn't be – even with conflicting ideals, they're friends now, they should be accepting each other. Except it's not really about religion, it's about everything else, too – every time Marti's woken up to Dan on the floor between their beds, every time Marti's kept Savannah up a little too late at night, every nuance, every hurt. For a while they argue, then yell. And then, for a while, they don't talk at all.

But then it's a few days later, and the rest of the squad organises an intervention, but instead Marti gets a call on her cell and escapes to the fresh air outside before anything can be said. She doesn't come back in.

They think she's being stubborn, running off, and they try to call her back but she doesn't pick up her phone. Aside from Dan, none of the cheerleaders know her other friends, so when they give him a call and he lets them know he hasn't seen her, they give up. They figure it can wait another night, and they can do it in the morning instead. Except that Savannah wakes up the next morning with the other bed untouched and no sign of Marti's return, and her immediate concern spreads to the rest of them. Dan gets another call, still doesn't know a thing. He tries Wanda, but she doesn't pick up.

It's Vanessa who gives them the news, and she seems a little hesitant with the level of disclosure, too. "It's her mother. Had a nasty fall last night, she's in hospital. Marti's staying with her. There's not a lot wrong with her, really, just – there's a possibility – and she hasn't wo-"

_Woken up_, Savannah fills in to herself. And with barely any thought to it, she's out of the room, anxiety twisting through her veins. The drive seems to take longer than it should have, and when she gets to the hospital she's quick enough to find the right room. It doesn't occur to her that Dan should be called for their friend, or that knocking might be a polite option.

All she knows is that she's opened the door to an ashen-faced Marti on a chair beside a gurney with a still Wanda Perkins lying on the bed. Without a word she rushes to Marti's side, takes the girl's hand, and then pulls her to stand, into a hug. There are no tears. Just dry comfort, warmth, forgiveness. They wait for hours. The sun sets before either of them speak a word.

"She's, uhm..." Marti hazards eventually, and it's the smallest Savannah's ever heard her. It's unnatural, and she doesn't like it. Where's the unknowing strength she's so used to? "...she's not waking up. And I don't know what to do."

Neither of them are entirely sure where the marker comes from, but soon enough Savannah's scrawling 'faith' across Marti's knuckles, and her own, and then interlocking their temporarily tattooed fingers, and the tight clasp of their hands is enough, for a while. It's ironic, really, that she's letting such a word reside on her skin when only a few days before she'd been at Savannah's throat about religion. But they've both accepted that while she doesn't share Savannah's faith in god, she does have faith in other things.

Her mother opens her eyes at three o'clock the next morning.

**/-/**

_Touch._

Dan and Savannah part ways six months after they start dating. Monogamy was never really his thing, but he'd _tried_, at least. He'd done quite well, really, and he'd never actually cheated. It was when he started to actually consider it that he waved the white flag of surrender, and it was something Savannah took with surprising grace. It seemed, really, a bit like she'd expected it. And maybe she had – there had been a certain sense of skepticism from the very beginning, that any union of Monroe and Patch wasn't meant to be.

She moped for a while. So did he. Three weeks later, he was juggling dates and she was bouncing around on campus with the same old pre-Dan smile on her face that was almost-but-not-entirely fulfilled and kind-of-but-not-really looking for something else. Something that fit. But Marti had to assume that kind of smile was a better fit than the somewhat pretentious one she'd worn in the later days of the Dan-Savannah debacle.

There's a party over at some dumb footballer's house, and the rest of the squad seems to have cleared out to go to it. Savannah's doing something in the kitchen, and Marti's stuck up in bed with a textbook and a highlighter, going to town on the page. They'd both had every opportunity to leave – go drink and party it up with the others – but instead they'd taken for a quiet night in for no particular reason, and so Savannah had feigned illness and Marti had stayed behind to 'look after her'. In reality, neither of them were really doing a whole lot of anything, other than listening to music from the laptop on the bedside table and going over study notes that they didn't really need to worry about at the time.

There was a little bit of chatting here and there, and not much else. Eventually, the book was thrown aside, the music was turned up, and the cheer captain returned to her room with a cup of hot chocolate in her hand and a dancing cheerleader to greet her.

The dancing turns into spinning, and a lot of laughter, and then Marti falls on the bed, her shirt riding up at the waist with the motion. There's a gap between Savannah's station at the door, and her station at the bedside, and there's a flurry of motion when nothing actually moves – butterflies where they shouldn't exist, and wants that shouldn't be. Next thing that either of them knows, there's another sharpie in Savannah's hand, and she moves it down to the bare trace of Marti's stomach. She traces expert words on the taut skin, as if the girl's little more than a canvas for her will. There's an intake of breath on one side, the other silently swallows. The marker is discarded. The message is read. Marti doesn't know if it's command, request, suggestion – she can't pin it.

But as the night goes on uninterrupted, it's what she does.


End file.
